AMD is back?

After almost 2 years of slow but sure decrease in value and almost 2 years since the last full CPU release, AMD has registered a steady rise in the last 3 months. Do you want to know why this has happened? Then, read along. You are in for a fantastic ride.

First, let me give you a little bit of background. In year 2014 AMD announced that they are out of the CPU race, giving the reason that they are not competitive enough and would prefer to keep focus on the APU and GPU line. After this, they started bringing less and less innovation in the GPU line, with rebadges over rebadges, going as far as using GPUs dating back from 2012 in the 2015 line. Yes, 3-year-old GPUs in current Lineup. What has determined AMD to do this? The answer is quite complicated actually. Maybe focusing on developing high performance memory (HBM) or maybe working on their new CPU architecture. The problem with this is that they started going down in value and losing competition against NVidia and Intel. This has resulted in them not really caring if they brought anything interesting or not because they simply did not have competition in some degree.

After all this passive time, AMD started to fight back to gain the throne once again, and by releasing the Fury line, things turned a little bit North for the company, starting to gain the trust of gamers and companies slowly but surely because they did once again what they did back in the day when AMD was the king. Innovate. Putting a never-heard-before type of memory in powerful enough chip to drive it save AMD`s silicon ass by quite a bit.

Let me start answering the big question. As you probably know by now, AMD has unveiled two big things lately: Polaris and Zen. Let’s take Polaris first. A new GPU architecture that proposes lower power consumption and higher performance than ever before. Based on the 14nm FinFET, giving the engineers almost double the transistors to work with for the same cost than past 28nm architecture Polaris has a lot of chances of succeeding in beating NVidia. Adding to that that 14nm FinFET transistors have the ability of switching states much faster, AMD is in for the game once again. Speaking of Zen, AMD is claiming to increase the performance per core by 40% than past architecture, combining it with higher core-count they have some chances of beating Intel.

Surely, we have to wait until NVidia and Intel fight back to see what AMD has achieved, but from my point of view, even if AMD does not beat the 2 giants because they brought something much powerful to the market, we, the consumers have a bright future because, maybe, the GPU and CPU war will accelerate and start again respectively.

My name is BMC and I am a superhero. Well, maybe not a superhero, but what is certain is that I am an aspiring writer with high hopes and big dreams. I started writing in the summer of 2013 on this website and let me say, it is a fantastic ride!